In February 2023, Wilks joined WiredVibe as Director of AI and a Board Member, with the goal of commercializing his previous research and ideas.

That early work was hand-coded with semantic entries (of the order of some hundreds) as was normal at the time, but since then has led to the empirical determinations of preferences (chiefly of English verbs) in the 1980s and 1990s.

Preference Semantics is thus some of the earliest computational work—with programs run at Systems Development Corporation in Santa Monica in 1967 in LISP on an IBM360—in the now established field of word sense disambiguation.

In the 1990s Wilks also became interested in modelling human-computer dialogue and the team led by David Levy and him as chief researcher won the Loebner Prize in 1997.

In 1998, Wilks became head of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Sheffield, where he had started working in the year 1993 as professor of artificial intelligence, a post he still held.

[10] National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C1672/24) with Yorick Wilks in 2016 for its Science and Religion collection held by the British Library.